Sunday, March 14, 2010

Why Climatologists are not to be trusted

A friend questioned my continued distrust of the IPCC and the scientists therein. He said that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Because I am involved in a startup company, it has taken me a while to get to this issue. The dishonesty in climatology has been a long time practice and it is documentable.

In 1996 the IPCC published the Second Assessment Report (SAR). Of that SAR report, Frederick Seitz, former president of Rockefeller University and former president of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences, wrote about the corruption of the process that led to the un-peer-reviewed changes in Chapter 8 which covered the scientific evidence. What had happened was that the scientists had approved a final version, which was supposed to go to press. But after the final approval and before the typesetting, changes were made to the text which removed any comments about doubts that climatologists might have. Seiter notes:

"Few of these changes were merely cosmetic; nearly all worked to remove hints of the skepticism with which many scientists regard claims that human activities are having a major impact on climate in general and on global warming in particular.“The following passages are examples of those included in the approved report but deleted from the supposedly peer-reviewed published version:

• "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."

• "No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes."

• "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced."

The reviewing scientists used this original language to keep themselves and the IPCC honest. I am in no position to know who made the major changes in Chapter 8; but the report's lead author, Benjamin D. Santer, must presumably take the major responsibility.”Frederick Seiter, A Major Deception on Global Warming Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996 source

Clearly whoever did that editing didn’t want the public to see that there was doubt among the climatologicical community. Seitz further noted,

“This IPCC report, like all others, is held in such high regard largely because it has been peer-reviewed. That is, it has been read, discussed, modified and approved by an international body of experts. These scientists have laid their reputations on the line. But this report is not what it appears to be--it is not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page. In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.” Frederick Seiter, A Major Deception on Global Warming Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996 source

Elimination of Boreholes.

For over 100 years, it has been scientific knowledge that the Medieval period was warmer than today. That was the standard belief in climatological circles. But if that was true, then today’s warming is nothing very spectactular, unusual or unprecedented. H. H. Lamb, the founder of the Climate Research Unit gathered much evidence for the Medieval Warm period.

"In central Norway the area of settlement, forest clearance and cultivation, which appears to have been more or less static since early iron age times, spread rather rapidly 100-200 m farther up the valleys and hillsides in the course of about two centuries from around A. D. 800; it retreated as decisively in the 14th century - partly owing to the Black Death, though the higher level farms were left unoccupied for hundreds of years thereafter, and in some areas further farms were abandoned before the advancing glaciers as late as 1743."~H. H. Lamb, "The Early Medieval Warm Epoch and its Sequel", Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 1, 1965, p. 16

"The Arctic pack ice was so much less extensive than in recent times that appearances of drift ice near Iceland and Greenland south of 70[deg] N, were apparently rare in the 10th century and unknown between 1020 and 1194, when a rapid increase of frequency caused a permanent change of shipping routes. Brooks suggested that the Arctic Ocean became ice-free in the summers of this epoch, as in the Climatic Optimum; but it seems more probable that there was some 'permanent' ice, limited to areas north of 80[deg] N."~H. H. Lamb, "The Medieval Warm Epoch and its Sequel", Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology, 1:1965, p. 15-16

And it wasn't just a European affair:

"In the period from about AD 500 to 1800, nine minima arerecorded in the d18O curve. Three minima of d18O at about ad1550, 1650 and 1750 correspond with the most severe cold climate,which occurred between ad 1550 and 1700 (Lamb, 1966).There is an obvious warm period represented by the high d18Ofrom around ad 1100 to 1200 which may correspond to the MedievalWarm Epoch of Europe (Lamb, 1966). At that time, thenorthern boundary of the cultivation of citrus tree (Citrus reticulataBlanco) and Boehmeria nivea (a perennial herb), both subtropicaland thermophilous plants, moved gradually into the northernpart of China, and it has been estimated that the annual meantemperature was 0.9–1.0[deg] C higher than at present (Zhang, 1994)."Y. T. Hong, et al, "Response of climate to solar forcing recorded in a 6000-year 18O time-series of Chinese peat cellulose," The Holocene, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1-7 (2000), p. 4

The existence of this warm period was a thorn in the side of the climatological alarmists. It screamed that today's warming is nothing new. The medieval warm period became the enemy.

In 1995, Dr. David Deming, a geophysicist at the University of Oklahoma published a paper in Science, “Climate Warming in North America: Analysis of Borehole Temperatures,” Science, 268(1995), pp 1576-1577. That article addressed only the past 100-150 years of history and showed that the globe had warmed. That got Deming into the ‘club’ and in discussions of the climate history which in turn led to an amazingly honest email by a climate alarmist as to what must be done to advance their cause.

John Overpeck of the University of Arizona, and a lead author of the IPCC wrote to Deming, “We have to get rid of the Mediaeval Warm Period.” (source and David Deming (2005) “Global Warming, the Politicization of Science, and Michael Crichton's State of Fear.” Forthcoming, Journal of Scientific Exploration, v.19, no.2.

Science should not have the purpose of getting rid of something. It should be in the business of going with the evidence. Getting rid of the Medieval Warm period was going to take a lot of work. Two years after Deming’s work, Shapoeng Huang, Henry Pollack, and Po Yu Shen, published “Late Quaternary Temperature Changes Seen in Worldwide Continental Heat Flow Measurements, Geophysical Research Letters, 24(1997), p 1947-1950. The article analyzed 6000 borehole temperature records from around the world for the past 20,000 years. It was an amazing piece of work and confirmed the existence of the Medieval warm period. Below is the graph of temperature from that paper. Note that the Medieval period was warmer than the present and that means that we are not having any unprecedented warming.

But that was the wrong conclusion. Huang, Pollack and Shen got the message and they cherry-picked only 358 of the 6000 borehole measurements and cherry-picked the time frame (only 500 years rather than 20,000 years. From this drastically reduced data set they published an article proclaiming the modern warming was ‘unusual’. This from about 5% of the data and 2.5% of the time interval, all carefully chosen. They wrote in 1998.

“Analyses of underground temperature measurements from 358 boreholes in eastern North America, central Europe, southern Africa, and Australia indicate that, in the 20th century, the average surface temperature of Earth has increased by about 0.5°C and that the 20th century has been the warmest of the past five centuries. The subsurface temperatures also indicate that Earth's mean surface temperature has increased by about 1.0°C over the past five centuries. The geothermal data offer an independent confirmation of the unusual character of 20th-century climate that has emerged from recent multiproxy studies." Henry N. Pollack, * Shaopeng Huang, Po-Yu Shen, "Climate Change Record in Subsurface Temperatures: A Global Perspective," Science 9 October 1998: Vol. 282. no. 5387, pp. 279 - 281 source

This was their new graph, created to support global warming.

They ignored the Medieval Warm epoch to advance their cause, even though they had to have known about their previous paper showing how NORMAL the current warming was--after all, THEY WROTE IT!!!. Note how different was their conclusion just a year earlier when they noted that there was nothing unusual about the 20th century.

“Analysis of more than six thousand continental heat flow measurements as a function of depth has yielded a reconstruction of a global average ground surface temperature history over the last 20,000 years. The early to mid-Holocene appears as a relatively long warm interval some 0.2–0.6 K above present-day temperatures, the culmination of the warming that followed the end of the last glaciation. Temperatures were also warmer than present 500–1,000 years ago, but then cooled to a minimum some 0.2–0.7 K below present about 200 years ago. Although temperature variations in this type of reconstruction are highly smoothed, the results clearly resemble the broad outlines of late Quaternary climate changes suggested by proxies.” Huang, S., H. N. Pollack, and P. Y. Shen (1997), Late Quaternary temperature changes seen in world-wide continental heat flow measurements, Geophys. Res. Lett., 24(15), 1947–1950.

After the second, cherry-picked article was published, Pollack became the science advisor for Al Gore and worked on Gore’s movie. It seems that one must toe the line in order to advance in climatological circles. source

More changes to the text after review.

Richard Lindzen, a lead IPCC author gave testimony in 2001 to the Senate Commerce Committee. He said

“The preparation of the report, itself, was subject to pressure. There were usually several people working on every few pages. Naturally there were disagreements, but these were usually hammered out in a civilized manner. However, throughout the drafting sessions, IPCC ‘coordinators’ would go around insisting that criticism of models be toned down, and that ‘motherhood’ statements be inserted to the effect that models might still be correct despite the cited faults. Refusals were occasionally met with ad hominem attacks. I personally witnessed coauthors forced to assert their ‘green’ credentials in defense of their statements.

! The full text can be modified long after the authors have signed off.” http://www.lavoisier.com.au/articles/climate-policy/science-and-policy/Lindzen_McCain.pdf()

Now, in researching this issue, trying to find the above testimony, I learned another reason not to trust global warming advocates. I did a google search ( on March 14, 2010) on Lindzen and Senate Commerce Committee. I came up with the following list of links, notice the first one from Wikipedia.

When I clicked on the first link, I got the following evidence of suppression of dissent from global warming advocates.

These hysteriacs who claim to be on the side of science are really interested only in suppressing free research and freedom of expression. I got to the info I wanted by going to the cached pages. It seems that these AGW folk simply can’t stand to be criticized. They settle the science by not allowing any dissent.

Selection of the most alarming data.

In 2001, Stephen Schneider, a lead author of the IPCC noted that the predictions of climate rise were arbitrarily raised, not by the scientists.

"In the third assessment report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the climate modellers of working group 1 (see Box 1 for glossary) dramatically revised upwards the top-range limit of their predictions of global warming from the previous value of 1–3.5 [deg ] C to 1.4–5.8 [deg] C between now and 2100 (refs 1, 2). This sweeping revision depends on two factors that were not the handiwork of the modellers: smaller projected emissions of climate-cooling aerosols; and a few predictions containing particularly large CO2 emissions.”source

He went on to note that the IPCC rejected his advice that temperature rises be given probability distributions. Unfortunately the press loves to report the largest number; it sells more papers and the climatological bosses at IPC love it so they can get more funding.

The Hockey Stick

When Michael Mann published his now infamous no-hockey-stick graph of world climate history (above), Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick began to look at the work. After much work, they obtained Michael Mann’s methodology. Using it they found

In the above source, McKitrick is quoted as noting that if the IPCC really had a strong internal review process they would have found the error before Mann’s work was published and publicized. Such behavior shows that the climatological community is not to be trusted.

And then there is this:

“When McIntyre and McKitrick then submitted a letter to Nature, pointing out some of the technical flaws in the study which Nature itself had published in 1998, the journal sat on their letter for eight months, before saying that it wouldn’t appear. By a Catch 22 trick, Nature explained that they could only be allowed 500 words to make their point. But since in the editor’s view, this would not be enough to explain their point properly, he did not propose to print anything.” Christopher Booker, “The Real Global Warming Disaster, (New York: Continuum, 2009), p. 105

Nice! Science is such an open and honest profession, willing to accept criticism.Antarctica’s ice and...

Censorship in Moscow

There is a bizarre case of Professor David King, the science advisor to Tony Blair. Booker relates:

“Supporting Blair’s initiative, with an interview headed “Why Antarctica will soon be the only place to live’, Professor King claimed that the earth’s temperatures had risen to their highest level for ’60 million years’. At that time he said, repeating the point he had made earlier to the MPs, CO2 levels had soared to 10,000 parts per million, causing a massive reduction of life. ‘No ice was left on Earth. Antarctica was the best place for mammals to live, and the rest of the world would not sustain human life, he went on warming that, if humanity did not curb its burning of fossil fuels, ‘we will reach that level by 2100.” Christopher Booker, “The Real Gobal Warming Disaster, (New York: Continuum, 2009), p.112

King is not a climatologist but a surface chemist. His knowledge of geologic history is that of a kindergartener. A meteor killed the dinosaurs, The CO2 levels were above 1000 ppm but that was ten million years after the dinosaurs died off during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal maximum and during that time mammals lived all over the world, not just on Antarctica. Yet his was the voice of climate science for the UK government.

At a 2003 Russian Academy of Science conference on Kyoto, Dr. King attempted to suppress alternative viewpoints.

“He gave an ultimatum that two-thirds of the scientific contributors invited by the Academy were ‘undesirable’ and should not be allowed to speak. He appealed to Tony Blair’s office and the British Foreign Secretary jack Straw, who happened to be in Moscow, for pressure to be put on the Russian government and the conference organizers to insist that his demands were met.” Christopher Booker, “The Real Gobal Warming Disaster, (New York: Continuum, 2009), p. 114

Here is what Andrey Illarionov said:

“The British participants insisted on introducing censorship during the holding of this seminar. The chief science adviser to the British government, Mr. King, demanded in the form of an ultimatum at the beginning of yesterday that the program of the seminar be changed and he presented an ultimatum demanding that about two-third of the participants not be given the floor.

"The participants in the seminar who had been invited by the Russian Academy of Sciences, they have been invited by the president of the Academy of Sciences Yuri Sergeyevich Osipov. Mr. King spoke about "undesirable" scientists and undesirable participants in the seminar. He declared that if the old program is preserved, he would not take part in the seminar and walk out taking along with him all the other British participants.”source

Sea-level misconduct

Dr. Nils-Axel Morner a tide guage and sea-level expert has been a thorn in the side of the climate hysteriacs for quite some time. Morner was appointed lead IPCC author for sea level changes for the 2001 report. It is reported that he was amazed that only one of the 22 contributors to that area under his direction were actually expert in sea level (Booker, op cit, p. 115

He notes how tide gauges are selectively picked to show what is required:

“Another way of looking at what is going on is the tide gauge. Tide gauging is very complicated, because it gives different answers for wherever you are in the world. But we have to rely on geology when we interpret it. So, for example, those people in the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], choose Hong Kong, which has six tide gauges, and they choose the record of one, which gives 2.3 mm per year rise of sea level. Every geologist knows that that is a subsiding area. It’s the compaction of sediment; it is the only record which you shouldn’t use. And if that figure is correct, then Holland would not be subsiding, it would be uplifting. And that is just ridiculous. Not even ignorance could be responsible for a thing like that. So tide gauges, you have to treat very, very carefully. Now, back to satellite altimetry, which shows the water, not just the coasts, but in the whole of the ocean. And you measure it by satellite. From 1992 to 2002, [the graph of the sea level] was a straight line, variability along a straight line, but absolutely no trend whatsoever. We could see those spikes: a very rapid rise, but then in half a year, they fall back again. But absolutely no trend, and to have a sea-level rise, you need a trend. Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC’s] publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn’t look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn’t recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” which they took from the tide gauge." " Interview: Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner: Claim That Sea Level Is Rising Is a Total Fraud" Economics, June 22, 2007, p. 34

Just because someone can produce a graph doesn’t mean that the graph is true. But this is also true of other data.

Urban Heat Island Shenanagans

In 1990 Phil Jones et al, published a study of the urban heat island effect (Nature 347, 169-172). The Chinese stations used were claimed to have been stable and not undergone any station location moves. Anyone familiar with the Wen Hua Ge Ming (Cultural Revolution) and prior events in China knows that nothing in China in the Maoist era was constant. The station data was acquired by a contact of Wei-Chyung, one of Jone’s co-authors. The station locations were unknown. Yet that data was used to convince the world that urbanization doesn’t cause a heat problem. The locations of the stations was challenged in 2007. Nature quotes Jones:

“I thought it was the right way to get the data,’ Jones says, but he now acknowledges that ‘the stations probably did move’ and that not having a detailed history of stations’ locations was sloppy. ‘It’s not acceptable,’ he says.’ [It’s] not best practice.’” Olive Hefferman, “’Climategate’ Scientist Speaks Out,” Nature, 463(2010), p. 860

Yeah, it isn’t best practice. But then, when in 2001, Jones learned that some of those stations had gone through several location moves, he failed to withdraw the influential 1990 paper. In a very hard hitting critique of Wei-Chyung’s research, Douglas Keenan writes:

"How much did Jones know about Wang’s fabrications? As discussed in my Report on Wang’s claims, it appears very likely that Jones knew nothing at the time (1990). In 2001, however, Jones co-authored a study, by Yan et al., which considered two meteorological stations in China (at Beijing and at Shanghai). This study correctly describes how the stations had undergone relocations, and it concludes that those relocations substantially affected the measured temperatures—in direct contradiction to the claims of Wang. Thus, by 2001, Jones must have known that the claims of Wang were not wholly true."

"On 19 June 2007, I e-mailed Jones about this, saying “this proves that you knew there were serious problems with Wang’s claims back in 2001; yet some of your work since then has continued to rely on those claims, most notably in the latest report from the IPCC”. I politely requested an explanation. I have not received a reply. Douglas J. Keenan, THE FRAUD ALLEGATION AGAINST SOME CLIMATIC RESEARCH OF WEI-CHYUNG WANG, Energy and the Environment, 18 :7&8 :987 source

And the game continues.

There is the Himalayan glaciers are gone by 2035 mistake, where they used a non-peer reviewed World Wildlife Federation info paper to scare the world into thinking that there are dire consequences. source

The IPCC can’t even get right the part of the Netherlands that is below sea level.

“Dutch environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart has asked the U.N.'s climate change panel to rethink its assertion that more than half of the Netherlands is below seal level. Dutch authorities explain that, in fact, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level.” source

Even Science magazine is now cognizant of the problems that climatology has presented to the scientific community. They write:

“E-mails uncovered late last year revealed instances of scientists on the panel discussing withholding data dn documents from those with opposing view, conspiring to keep contradictory papers out of influential reports, and encouraging colleagues to delete e-mails.” Eli Kintisch, “Scientists Grapple with “Completely out of hand Attacks on Climate Science,” Science, 327(2010), p. 1070

Note the title of that Science article. While Gerald North of Texas A&M said that the situation is completely out of control and Sheila Jasanoff said:

“The community allowed ‘the situation to get out of control,’ said Sheila Jasanoff of Harvard University. She said in general scientists had to connect better to the public. ‘There is a kind of arrogance—we are scientists and we know best,’ Jasanoff said. ‘That needs to change.” Eli Kintisch, “Scientists Grapple with “Completely out of hand Attacks on Climate Science,” Science, 327(2010), p. 1070

Science magazine shows its bias by claiming that it is the ‘attacks on climate science’ which are out of hand. In reality it was the scientists. New Scientist put it thusly, while reporting on a enquiry into climategate.

“However, written evidence submitted by the Institute of Physics in London claimed the hacked emails have revealed ‘evidence of determined and coordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions’ through ‘manipulation of the publication and peer-review system’ and ‘intolerance to challenge.’” Anonymous, “Jones Explans,” New Scientist, March 6, 2010, p. 4

Climatologists are not to be trusted and that is sad because science should be about truth not about political agendas. Yet in the hands of the climatologists, science got a very big black eye by their atrocious behavior.

5 comments:

This is good stuff, so good I'm going to kipe a bunch of it to use against the warmists who will be writing letters to the editor in the local paper tomorrow.

THANKS much. Hope you don't mind terribly.

It's for a good cause. You see, here in California we have a petition drive to, as the SacBee editor puts it, ".. gut the law (the global warming solutions act of 2006) by suspending its implementation until unemployment drops dramatically, to 5.5 percent."

and why I have to trust in scientific? a person that said about ten years ago "don't worry the global warming is just a fantasy" or something that twenty years ago said "don't woory the water is endless source", just tell me how I can trust in persons like this?

Yeah an epic question, because they are never right, in rainy season here i never never never left my umbrella at home rain come anytime, i always believed that this guys stole the salary and a few years ago i confirm that...

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I have had 39 years experience looking for oil and gas around the world, from Scotland, to Algeria, to the East Coast of the United States, South Texas, West Texas, the Rocky Mountain region, Alaska and China. I have found 33 oil fields and drilled my share of dry holes. The various positions held by me include: Manager of Geophysical Training for a major oil Co., Chief Geophysicist for a small independent oil company, Geophysical Manager - Onshore Gulf Coast, Geophysical Manager--Gulf of Mexico and Chief Geophysicist for China , Manager Geophysics for the US Offshore, Geophysical Manager for the North Sea, Director of Integrated Technology, Director of Exploration for China with a large independent oil company and lived in Beijing China. I speak Mandarin (not fluent but able to communicate). Currently I have my own geophysical consulting firm, living in Houston